Two screens, one register
- Exam & Attendance › Take Attendance — marks a day for the first time.
- Exam & Attendance › View/Update Attendance — changes a day that is already marked.
🔴 Take Attendance does not list a student whose attendance for that date already exists. That is the single most common "a student is missing from the list" question, and it is working correctly — go to View/Update Attendance for that child instead.
Taking attendance
- Pick the date.
- Every student arrives marked Present, so change only the ones who are not. Which statuses you see (Absent, Leave, Late, Off Day…) depends on the acronyms your school has switched on under Admin › Attendance Acronym Active/Inactive.
- Press Save Attendance, or Save & Send SMS to save and message the parents of anyone not present in one step.
🔴 Save writes the TICKED rows, not the filtered ones
Every row starts ticked — that is the point of the screen, one click marks the whole roll. Using a column filter or the search box to narrow the grid hides rows; it does not untick them.
The line above the buttons always tells you exactly how many students Save is about to write, and warns you when your filters are hiding rows you had selected. Read that line before you save. If you want to mark one class only, untick everything and tick that class.
Correcting a day
On View/Update Attendance, set From and To — the same date twice to work on one day — change the statuses, and save. A wide range is for reviewing what was recorded, not for bulk editing.
Changing a status here does not re-send any SMS the original save sent. If parents need telling, use the SMS screens.
Holidays
When the date you have chosen is in Core › Holiday Calendar, both screens say so at the top and nobody is marked absent automatically that day. You can still mark attendance — it is a reminder, not a block, because schools do hold make-up classes and papers on closed days.
Attendance that marks itself
- QR and biometric scans write attendance as students arrive. A scan produces a row with a real in-time; marking by hand later changes the status, not the scan times.
- Auto-absent, where your school uses it, marks anyone unmarked at the end of the day — but never on a weekly off day or a day in the Holiday Calendar.
🔴 An attendance row is not proof that anybody scanned in. A row is created by a teacher marking the register, a bulk Off Day, a leave, and the auto-absent job as well — so read the in-time, not the presence of the row.
Press Save once — and what to do about a student listed twice
Press Save Attendance once and wait for the green Attendance Saved Successfully message. The button disables itself while the save is running.
Before 25 August 2026, pressing Save again before the first save finished sent the whole class a second time and the register was written twice — so a child could appear several times for one day, with the same date and the same time on every copy. That is fixed: the server now accepts one save at a time per school and treats a repeat as "already marked".
🔴 Copies saved before the fix are still there. They make attendance reports over-count: three copies of one present day read as three present days. To clear them, open View/Update Attendance, set From and To to that one day, filter to the class or the student, tick only the extra copies — leave one row per student, and press Delete Attendance.
✅ EDUBase cleared these centrally on 25 August 2026, for every school that had them. If your reports were over-counting attendance days, they are correct again from that date — you do not need to do anything.
🔴 One kind of copy was deliberately left alone: a day where the two copies disagree — one says Present and the other says Absent. Nobody can safely decide that for you, so those were listed for your school instead of being deleted. Fix them on this screen: set the day to the status you want and delete the other copy.
From 25 August 2026 the system also refuses a second record for the same student on the same day outright, so no new copies can be created — whether the register is marked on the web, in the Teacher App, or by a QR / face scan.
One thing that makes the copies hard to spot: on View/Update Attendance the Campus, Class, Section and Session columns show where the student is enrolled today, not what is stored on that record — so two records for the same child on the same day can look identical in every column.
QR gate schools: Present here is not a scan
If the school uses QR / biometric attendance, a child who has not scanned yet still starts as Present on this screen. That is the unmarked default, not proof they arrived. For the list of children the auto-absent job has marked (In time + Mark Absent After minutes, Auto-Absent Classes ticked), use Exam & Attendance › Absentees. Guide: List absent students after the QR grace period.